By the way, none of the content on Shhhh! Digital Media is produced anywhere other than 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701, Toronto, Ontario, Canada and there are no other writers other than myself, Brian Joseph Johns, who write content for Shhhh! Digital Media.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment at Grange Road for 9:30 AM on Monday March 24.

Happy Birthday to Doctor David Suzuki!

Chapters

In The Beginning (Started March 12, 2025 3:30 PM EST)

Jerusalem
The Era Of The First Temple
The Second Temple
The Late Roman And Byzantine Eras
Shia Fatimids And The Great Schism
Jerusalem And The Crusades (Coming soon...)

Please be patient with this story as a lot of research is required and is an on going effort as I write this.

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Shhhh! Digital Media

Brian Joseph Johns

Opening Notes:

According to my research of how most special operations unfold, when it comes to chatter between team members (or squads), there is no character building banter between them and the reason for this is because the comms are specifically for relaying timing and mission critical data between squad members. So you'll never hear lines during an active mission by members of such teams like:

"Remember that time we were in that bar in Tangiers, and old Roger stood up and threw his beret at bartender?"

When you see that kind of activity in the movies or read it in the pages of a book, most often this is because the writers need to use every opportunity they can to acquaint you with the operators taking part in such a mission. That's a necessary part of the story telling, because they're people, and if you don't understand that and that they have their hopes and dreams too, then why would you even care, other than the natural propensity of most people to have some degree of compassion towards their fellow humankind.

Soldiers do joke and quite often, but rarely if ever in the midst of an operation. Focus, not levity is most often key to their success, and we're talking about professionals.

Perhaps that speech before their last stand might have such elements of levity, and call upon their love of whatever it is they're protecting, but while they're doing they're thing, there's no small talk, unless they did so in an instance to declare their independence from me and what I'm saying here. When they speak to each other, they own their communications. All of them.

So in a story like this, my use of banter between operators is a means by which I'm letting you know that these people doing these difficult tasks that often happen unbeknownst to us in order to protect and preserve the peace, the world over, have hopes and dreams as much so as any one of us. The difference is, that they often put their lives on the line to ensure that we have ours.

Hence, we owe it to them to remind the world that there's people inside of They Who Stand On Guard.

Please be aware that many complex topics related to history and religion will be touched upon througout the course of the story, and in doing so I hope to retain a high degree of objectivity and fairness when dealing with these topics. Everyone will get their fair say and representation.

Brian Joseph Johns

Shhhh! Digital Media Presents:

The Butterfly Dragon: We Who Stand On Guard - Episode 10

In The Beginning

When you're staring down the length of your SMG, through an IR sight at a group of targets during an operation, you get to know quite a bit about those whom you're observing.

For one, I know that one of them is left-handed (whom I'll refer to as Lefty from herein), but trying to keep that hidden, indicating that he was likely disciplined as a child for exhibiting such involuntary behaviour. It wasn't the fault of his parents, who grew up during a time of turmoil and superstition in a region of the world that has not had as much rest as it certainly deserves.

Their situation is much like living near the caldera of an active volcano, when it comes to the peace and politics of the region. It sputters and froths a lot keeping people on edge, but everyone knows that someday the pressure beneath the surface is going to overcome the forces containing it, and its going to blow.

Full tilt.

Living amidst pressure of that kind can take a toll on people, and shape you in ways that would be very difficult for those of us living in the relative lap of luxury comparatively so to fully understand or appreciate. That doesn't mean that we should feel guilty for our fortune, as these times are tough for us all in some way or another. It does mean though, that in our position of relative comfort a great distance from that ever rumbling volcano, that we should consider the state of things and how we got here.

Lefty certainly didn't think anything of the fact that using his left hand where others would use their right should get him into any trouble, but it did, and that changed him enough so that thirty-five years down the road, his condition would be obvious to an operator watching him in the middle of the night through an infra-red sight affixed to his MP5, as Lefty helped a crew of five other men arm the nuclear warheads on a shipment of cruise missiles they had received earlier in the same evening, less than one hundred and sixty kilometers from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, which presumably would be one of their targets if ever fired.

Lefty was the driver of the truck of said shipment, and had two labourers with him, one of whom (Trim Beard) had obviously done much labour in his life, and was remarkably fit and well fed for someone who was not overtly a member of any of the militant insurgencies of the region (HAMAS or ISIS for instance).

My guess is that he was all show, and probably very frightened with the prospect of being presented with a Kalashnikov and expected to use it against the threat to their borders and way of life. He instead made up for this fear by taking part in the logistics as a labourer, who had obviously learned much about installing and maintaining such ad-hoc installations recently, given how this particular group had come into possession of a kit whose price tag was likely near fifty million, including the materials unaccounted for which were certainly the key component of the warheads themselves.

Technology was making installations like this more affordable than ever before, and this was the entry level such installation being offered by the very outfit my people were investigating.

The other labourer (Sidekick) was thin and clearly trying very hard to be useful and to make an impression, despite the fact that he struggled with most of the heavy lifting and mechanical aspects that their work entailed on this particular night. He often joked aloud, to which Lefty would react by telling him to shut-up and get to work. If Lefty didn't say anything, then Trim Beard would take advantage in the opening in seniority and have a go at Sidekick, much the same telling him to be quiet and work more and talk less. Definitely a very clear pecking order in their shipping operation and in all, they probably weren't that much different from similar trucking crews in other parts of the world, if you didn't factor in the aspect about them helping to assemble a nuclear capable launch platform.

What was also very apparent, is that Lefty was working for the man who spent most of the time while the site was being assembled speaking on the phone, (whom I'll refer to as Top Dog). With whom he was speaking wasn't one of those critical aspects that had made its way down the pipeline to us in the field at that point. He was very calm and collect despite the danger of that with which he was tampering by installing an ad-hoc nuclear launch platform on his farm. There was resolve in him, and he'd clearly given it much thought and felt no quarter over the risks entailed either towards himself, and the community of which he was a part. A man who would never kill with his own two hands, but would employ machinery to kill thousands of those whose faces he'd never have to see.

Much the same as he, was the man (Tech Head) who had assembled and utilized the mechanical loading mechanism which they'd operated by a hand crank, lowering the missiles down into the magazine, the first cruise missile into the feed tray from where they'd be loaded onto the firing platform once powered with electricity. He was a man who had done much mechanical work before, and certainly seemed to possess an uncanny familiarity with arms and armament. He could probably operate and maintain small arms, including heavy weapons, but was much more of a threat given large armaments of the kind used in mobile or permanent installations. He was focused on his work, and if it hadn't been a launch platform he was assembling, it might have been a grain elevator for one of the farmers, given different circumstances. The same skills, applied to very different tools.

All five of these men could just as easily have been hard at work on any continent and amongst any community, assembling some kind of machinery for their prosperity and livelihood as many people do the world over. Instead, they were constructing the means to a sudden and terrifying end for their neighbours a short distance from them, and all of this could be seen clearly through the infra-red device affixed to my own MP5SD SMG, the business end of which was pointed in their direction, ready to take them all down if necessary.

When looking through the sights at a tango, from a position of tactical obscurity, one might be tempted to assume that its a power trip for the trigger man. Holding within their trigger finger, the lives of five men, or at least in this case, the three that I'd tagged, the other two being the primary focus of Donahue, who lay prone upon a sandbank ridge overlooking the AO* about three hundred meters to the south of my position.

In all honesty and during an operation, or at least in the case of veteran operators, there is very little going on in the way of reflection, either regarding the life circumstances that found your tango in the sights of your crosshair, or your own life and the meaning of it all. We're trained and filtered not to consider anything of that nature, especially so during an operation.

We work with hard data and facts pertinent to the tactical operation itself, and it was only due to my own involvement with the investigation that I had any clue of the inner workings of what was behind this newly emerged network of low cost, highly effective armaments and sites and their growing deployment in the Middle East region.

These men, each of them had knowingly traveled down a road (some more aware than others) and were well beyond the point of no return. They knew they were assembling a facility whose sole purpose was the extinguishing of thousands of lives in an instant, their targets a relatively short distance from their current location, and given the secrecy of the emergence of this site, this was not a deterrent in the form of a political manouevre to counter the speculated nuclear capabilities of their neighbours. This was a clear threat to thousands of innocent civilians, and to the stability of the region.

A much bigger question though was hidden in the midst of this mess and it was seldom a question that people stopped to ask themselves and truly consider it long enough that we might one day come to a solution. In different circumstances, these men would undoubtedly be involved in their society in some peaceful and productive way. Who is to say that any one of us suddenly thrust into their shoes wouldn't just as quickly become part of the pack:

When you run with the wolves, then be a wolf. When you run from them, then be the prey. Know your place in the twisted paths of this jungle. Play your part and play it well, for survival depends upon it. Certainly an anecdote explored by Kipling, and in this existence, world and lifetime, it was more than applicable to us all.

However, that still begged a solution and the question, where did it all begin?

...

Jerusalem

Jerusalem. That's not the entire answer, but it is certainly a big part of it, and in order to understand why many nations of the region feel a strong connection to the city, we have to examine its long history.

It is a city that has been layed entirely to waste twice over during its lifetime. Invaders have laid siege to the city no less than twenty-three times. It has been attacked fifty-two times, while being captured or recaptured forty-four.

Evidence suggests that the city emerged sometime around four thousand BCE, in a pocket of history between the middle bronze age and the early iron age. It was formed as groups of nomadic tribes began settling in the region near Gihon Spring, these tribes being mostly composed of the people originally from Caanan.

As the Middle Kingdom of Egypt expanded into the region, the growing city of Jerusalem became a vassal and remained as so, even through the tumultuous unrest of the transition to the New Kingdom of Egypt.

This remained the case between fifteen hundred (1500) BCE (approximately 3525 years ago) until around twelve seventy-four (1274) BCE, the date which began its transition into its future by way of the Battle Of Kadesh and was only punctuated by the Battle of Djahy ninety-seven years later.

The invaders came from a variety of sources, certainly the Hittites and their allies early on, though the most prominent of those speculated in later battles were known as the Sea People, a people who were exceptionally skilled in naval craft and ordinance, speculated to have possibly originated as the Minoans, one of most advanced cultures of that time.

The Era Of First Temple

It eventually became the independent city-state of the City of David in the United Kingdom of Israel, taking Jerusalem from it's then occupiers, the Jebusites who'd long held it. David invaded in 1010 BCE, marking the beginning of the Golden Age of Israel.

Shortly thereafter, forty-eight years later in 962 BCE, Solomon, King David's son, erects the First Temple, and when Solomon dies, it marks the end of the Golden Age of Israel. In Jerusalem however, its growing Jewish population and culture remain, while its most prominent Jewish citizens are eventually exiled and imprisoned in the nation of Babylon.

Over the next two-hundred years from 930 BCE, Jerusalem is sacked by Egypt, the Phillistines, the Arabs and the Ethiopians, until in 733 BCE, it becomes a vassal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, followed by it being taken again by the Twenty-Sixth dynasty of Egypt, and then bounced back to the Neo-Assyrian Empire (who were at this time known as the Neo-Babylonians), Jerusalem itself having been leveled (including the First Temple) in 586 BCE.

The Second Temple

It becomes the property of the Achaemenid Empire who conquer the Neo-Babylonians in 539 BCE, and it thrives under King Cyrus the Great, who allows the Jewish people in Babylonian captivity to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Much later in history, the waves of these liberated Babylonian Jewish are often alluded to in popular culture.

In the third century (332) BCE, Alexander the Great captures Jerusalem (with minimal damage or casualties) from the Persians after a successful campaign against Tyre. Jerusalem remains under the control of the Macedonians, until thanks to politics and the line of succession in the wake of the death of Alexander the Great, the Diadochi (Alexander's own powerful military figures, family and friends) eventually partition the state, and from here Jerusalem is transferred between ruling clans of the post Alexander empire until it eventually ends up under Ptolemaic rule in three-twenty (320) BCE.

Eventually Jerusalem ends up in the hands of the Seleucid Empire, who like the Ptolemaic Empire had respected Jewish rights and their institutions. Antiochus IV Epiphanes takes over the reigns of the Seleucid Empire through succession however, and through his efforts to quell a civil war between the Hellenistic Jewish community (whose worship included Jewish traditions mixed with Greek gods), and the traditional Jewish religion, by abolishing the Sabbath and circumcision and a host of other Jewish traditions, ends up spurring the Maccabean Revolt.

The revolt by the Maccabees is motivated by the protection of traditional Jewish religion from the state sponsored Hellenistic Jewish movement, though Antiochus IV Epiphanes actual role is often debated by scholars. Regardless, the Maccabeans recapture Jerusalem and rededicate the Second Temple, the origins behind the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, however the Maccabee revolt eventually ends with the death of Judas Maccabeus, and Jerusalem eventually ends up under the possession of the Hasmonean kingdom, one of the powerful Macedonian family clans of the region.

The Hasmodeans manage to hang on to Jerusalem, even paying an enormous tribute to spare the city from recapture by Seleucid King Antiochus VII Sidetes, and the city's influence upon the region only grows, until it eventually ends up in the hands of the Romans in 63 BCE, and into the early beginnings of Christianity, though much of this history has no scholarly consensus of record and non-sectarian backing. Regardless of this record, it is one of the most prominent aspects illustrating the strength of the connections between the people of the region and their beliefs, and to the city of Jerusalem.

A city for whom many throughout the entirety of modern human history have died and on every side of the proverbial fence. Fences that until this day, still unite and divide many throughout humanity.

Jerusalem's Hasmonean rule would begin its decline with the invasion of Jerusalem by the Romans under Pompey the Great, who despite having access and seeing the temple for himself, decided to leave it entirely intact.

The Hasmonean Kingdom is eventually divided into five regions ruled by councils known as sanhedrin, while Marcus Crassus loots the temple, taking its riches with him. Caesar's Civil War begins, as he and Pompey compete for rule of the Roman Empire, with Jerusalem being under Pompey's jurisdiction.

Eventually Caesar wrests control of the Roman Empire, but Jerusalem still remains under control of those under Pompey's allegiance. Jerusalem is eventually retaken by King Herod, an appointee under Julius Caesar who upon gaining control of the city, expands and enhances the Second Temple and between six and four BCE, Jesus is presented at the Temple, some forty days after his birth, according to scripture and without non-sectarian reference.

According to the same sources, some thirty years later and Jesus would be tempted by Satan, evict the merchants from Herod's Second Temple, heal a man blind from birth, eventually drawing the growing dissent of the people until he finally arrested by the sanhedrin and under Governor Pontius Pilate, sentenced to die by roughing and crucifiction sometime between thirty-three (33) and thirty-six (36) AD, completing his martyrdom according to religious texts.

The rest of the first century AD would find both Jewish people and the Christianis would find themselves under constant persecution under Roman Emperor Nero, spurring the Great Jewish Revolt and the First Jewish-Roman War, until Titus lays siege to Jerusalem and summarily ends the First Jewish-Roman war, destroying the Temple of Herod. Christian leaders are exiled to the city of Pella.

Late Roman And Byzantine Eras

Over the next two hundred years, the city would undergo changes in both leadership and its cultural identity when Emperor Hadrian rebuilds the city, making it monumental to the Roman God Jupiter, who is derived from the Greek god Zeus (obviously aggravating the traditional Jewish population by bringing up such references to Hellenistic Roman ideas, which had been an issue since the Seleucids).

Meanwhile, the Christian religion, spread almost entirely by word alone, continues to spread throughout the region. Both the traditional Jewish population and early Christians oppose growing persecution by the Romans, many of whom likely want to see their proto-Roman-Greco Judaism replace traditional Judaism as the empire's foundation religion, which would strengthen and unite the Meditterranean population of the region under a familiar deity, while being administered entirely by the Romans.

At the doorstep of the Byzantine era, Constantine I finally legalizes Christianity with the Edict Of Milan, and with the relief of Roman pressure, Christianity begins growing more and more rapidly, even at this point without so much as a formal printed religious text to document its divine legitimacy. A fact that would change one hundred years later, when the first scribed version of the New Testament would arise in 411 AD. From these origins four hundred years after the founding prophet of the religion had died, Christianity would begin its spread through written word, being copied only by scribes for nearly a thousand years to come.

Under the Byzantines, a number of important events throughout its history would come to transpire, including the destruction of the Temple of Venus by Helena, Constantine's mother and the alleged discovery of three important Christian artifacts dating back to the crucifixion, further cementing Christianity and its joining the Jewish legacy of the city of Jerusalem, a city already profoundly connected to many people of the region. Through history, ancestry and war.

Over the next three hundred years, Jerusalem will find itself and its population under attack, with Jewish people being exiled a number of times, only to return stronger again. New Christian churches were born. The city would be attacked a handful of times, and finally in the 6th century AD, the city would find itself under siege yet again, this time by the Sassanid Empire, who would wrest control of Jerusalem from the Byzantines and sew the seeds of Jerusalem's connection to both Muhammed and Islam. Six years after the Sassanid siege of Jerusalem, Muhammed's legendary voyage to Jerusalem (Isra and Mi'raj) takes place, beginning the Muslim Eras of Jerusalem.

The city is eventually taken by Arabian Caliph Umar the Great, and at the request of the city's Christian Patriarch, enters the city on his own two feet. The Covenant of Umar I is drawn up, and for the first time since earlier in the Roman era, religious freedom is granted to religions practiced in the city borders even while under Islamic rule. The Jewish people are able to live and worship freely for the first time since being ejected during the late Roman era and the Dome Of The Rock is built in six ninety-one (691) AD by Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.

Over the course of the next few centuries, Jerusalem would find itself in the hands of three different Caliphates, ending with the Abbasids and through centuries of regional strife and conflict as the ties to various regional religions and Churches (including the Armenian Apostilic Church, which much like the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre, are amongst the oldest Christian Churches in the region if not the entire world). This all occurred while under Muslim rule as much so as the remaining three centuries until 900 AD.

Shia Fatimids And The Great Schism

Jerusalem would fall under the control of the Ismaili Shia Fatimids, who in nine sixty-nine (969) AD, conquer the Abassid Empire, with the Shia guaranteeing the Sunni population religous freedom, but this act of good will is eventually undermined when in one thousand and nine (1009) AD, Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim orders the destruction of churches and synagogues throughout the empire and as a result, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is leveled, while not much later, the Dome of the Rock is expanded.

Thirty years later, Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos orders the reconstruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Caliph Ma'ad al-Mustansir Billah. agrees to the reconstruction and restoration of a number of Christian buildings, including the Muristan hospital, church and monastery.

The Great Schism divides the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, leaving Jerusalem in the Patriarchy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, setting the stage for the crusades in the centuries ahead.

Jerusalem changes hands between the Fatimids and the Byzantines several times until in ten ninety-eight, Al-Afdal Shahanshah recaptures the city and the Fatimid Empire once again holds onto the city of Jerusalem.